Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey at the National Gallery, review

An ambitious and enjoyable show tells the story behind Delaroche's popular
work. Rating: * * * *

The Execution of Lady Jane Grey is not the kind of picture people who know anything about art are supposed to like. When Paul Delaroche’s melodramatic canvas was shown in the Salon of 1834 it was a huge popular hit. But for progressive critics such as Théophile Gautier the picture already looked a little creaky, a relic of a moribund school of academic salon painting popularised in the previous century by Jacques Louis David. Fifty years later, Vincent Van Gogh singled out Delaroche as one of the “very bad history painters” whose work he despised.

Bequeathed to the Tate Gallery at the beginning of the 20th century, by 1928 the painting had been relegated to storage and was not seen again until it went on show at the National Gallery in 1974.

Then something extraordinary happened. A work still regarded by mainstream art historians as a bit of a hoot quickly established itself as one of the most popular pictures at Trafalgar Square, attracting so many viewers that even today the wooden floor directly in front of it must be polished far more often than any other spot in the gallery.

Now, an ambitious and hugely enjoyable show at the National Gallery shows that the public was right all along. With its impeccable draughtsmanship, immaculate finish and romantic subject matter, the picture may epitomise everything modern art rejected. Historians will object to anachronisms like Lady Jane’s wedding ring, and point out that no Tudor woman ever wore an undergarment like hers. But so what?

Taken on its own terms, it’s a damn good painting. With only five life-size figures, there isn’t a superfluous gesture, pose, prop or facial expression to vitiate the impact of the picture’s narrative drive. Like a best-selling novel that will never win the Booker, or a sold-out play the critics panned, it tells a terrific story and tells it so well that after one look, you’ll be hooked.

Lady Jane Grey was the 17-year-old great-grand-daughter of Henry VII, whom her cousin Edward VI named as his successor. After reigning for nine days as nominal Queen of England, she was deposed and executed for treason by the rightful monarch, Edward’s half-sister Mary Tudor. Delaroche’s picture is set in the Tower of London on the morning of her execution, February 12, 1554. In the moments before the one we are shown, Lady Jane has mounted the scaffold and removed her outer clothing, which is gathered in the lap of the lady-in-waiting slumped against the wall at the left. Unable to watch, her other lady-in-waiting turns to the wall. Blindfolded, the victim gropes with outstretched hands for the block, gently guided by the kindly lieutenant of the Tower, whose solicitude only adds to the pathos. The executioner waiting for Jane to fall to her knees closes the composition. Cleverly, Delaroche characterises the axe-man as a gentle giant, so moved by the piteous sight of the helpless girl’s bravery that he, too, averts his eyes.

Through each of these characters the viewer experiences a different reaction to the scene: despair, horror, fear, courage, compassion and pity. The absence of any compositional link between our space and the foreground instantly engages the viewer spatially by making us feel we are eyewitnesses. But since none of the figures looks out at us, none of the players in the drama is aware of our presence. This enables us voyeuristically to enjoy what they cannot bear to see.

Ratcheting up the tension, Delaroche brings his five figures into the foreground, and then cuts off all recession into space. Even the glimpse of gothic arches in the darkened hall beyond the scaffold is interrupted by the sharp point of a halberd. For Lady Jane, death is inevitable. In a moment she will lay her head on the narrow block.

When it has been severed from her body it will roll forward in our direction, out of the canvas and on to the floor in front of us. The straw, we realise, has been placed there to soak up her blood.

Whatever horror and pity the picture evokes in a British audience, just think how the subject must have resonated in the memory of countrymen who only 40 years earlier had cut off the heads of their king and queen. Here, and in a picture showing Cromwell viewing the decapitated corpse of Charles I (1831), it is as though Delaroche projected on to English history the national trauma it was not possible for a French artist at this period to depict directly.

Since I know so little about French art between the restoration of the monarchy in 1814 and the revolution of 1848, this show gripped me from start to finish. Be aware, however, that it is somewhat unusual for a show in the Sainsbury galleries in its reliance on prints and drawings to explore the relationship between Delaroche’s art and such subjects as the theatre, fancy dress, historicism, anglophilia, and the cult of the past. A friend once ticked me off for using the word “academic” as a pejorative, so I’ll just say it doesn’t exactly play to the crowd, or at least not in the way Delaroche was once accused of doing in his painting of Lady Jane Grey.